“I think that at the heart of all this, there’s a misunderstanding about the function of philosophy, of the intellectual, of knowledge in general: and that is, that it’s up to them to tell us what is good. Well, no! No, no, no! That’s not their role. They already have far too much of a tendency to play […]

Q: Would it be right to suggest that your work is not so much inter-disciplinary as a-disciplinary? A: Neither. It is ‘indisciplinary’. It is not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them. My problem has always been to escape the division between disciplines, because what interests me is the question […]

“Each of us is born into a particular world, governed by a particular system of norms and values, and a particular economic and political order. Since we are born into it, we take the surrounding reality to be natural and inevitable, and we tend to think that the way people today live their lives is […]

“Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is not, ‘Do your duty, I don’t care whether you like it or not,’ but: ‘You must do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it.’ (This is how totalitarian democracy works: it is not enough for the people to follow […]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) (Wikipedia) XXVIII (From The Gardener) Your questioning eyes are sad. They seek to know my meaning as the moon would fathom the sea. I have bared my life before your eyes from end to end, with nothing hidden or held back. That is why you know me not. If it were only […]

Happy birthday! From http://www.critical-theory.com This interview with Michel Foucault, titled “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual” dates back to November 3, 1980. According to Stuart Elden, “because it was published after Foucault’s death, it was deemed to be a ‘posthumous publication’ and therefore not included in ‘Dits et écrits,‘” a compilation of Foucault’s shorter writings in […]

The following summary of Foucault’s (1975) What is an Author is taken from Fendler’s (2010) Michel Foucault. Bloomsbury will make paperback version of the book available this December (2014). “This essay was published just after Discipline and Punish. In it, Foucault investigated what we mean when we say `author,’ and concluded that we mean many […]

Andreotti, V. (2014). Strategic criticism and the question of inaccessibility of the Other. Glottopol, 23, 134–147. Five different positions: problem-spaces of difference in education “In my provisional effort to re-create the practice of strategic criticism drawing on Scott’s ideas, I will offer a tentative (simplified and situated) cartography of how the concept of inaccessible alterity […]

Man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posted for human knowledge. – Michel Foucault The Chomsky- Foucault Debate on Human Nature (The New Press) That Time Foucault Got Paid in Hash to Debate Noam Chomsky